Life After Getting Expelled: What Really Happens When Students Are Kicked out of School

Is it a point of no return?

Cutting class, texting in homeroom, talking back to teachers: Sometimes it seems like there are a million different ways to get in trouble in high school. But what happens when a big mistake—or even a bunch of smaller ones—leads to something as extreme as suspension or expulsion? Are you totally out of luck? Or is it possible to get back on track after getting kicked out?

For teens around the country, these questions are far more common than you might think. An estimated 3.5 million students faced out-of-school suspension at least once during the 2011-12 school year, while 103,000 were expelled.

Rahsaan Ison, 15, was just a few months into his freshman year at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (NOCCA) when a lapse in judgment turned his life upside down. One morning in January, he ducked underneath a freight train parked on the tracks that block his school's entrance. He knew "crossing the train" was against the rules, but he had never walked to school before, and after 15 minutes waiting in the cold, he didn't want to be late. Expulsion never crossed his mind.

"When I found out I was in trouble, I was basically in shock," he says. "I just sat in my room for two days wondering what I was going to do. It all happened so quickly."

Rahsaan was given two choices: be expelled and have the incident noted on his record, or voluntarily withdraw. He withdrew.

Nowadays he can't set foot on school property or attend school-sponsored events, but has negotiated a deal that might get him back into NOCCA. He has to meet with administrators twice a week, as well as maintain a 2.0 GPA for their curriculum on top of his full homeschooling course load, in order for his admission to be reconsidered. As an arts student this can be especially tricky, since he no longer has access to things like video equipment or editing software; finding a laptop to use was his first priority. But, he says, it's better than his other option.

Like many students facing expulsion, Rahsaan was offered the choice of enrolling in an alternative school for "at-risk" students instead of homeschooling or taking online courses. Besides the campus's inconvenient location and abysmal academic record, those who matriculate there may have gotten kicked out for guns or drugs—a far cry from ducking under a parked train car. Rahsaan decided to pass on the opportunity.

Chanel Kitchen, 16, has heard similar stories about alternative schools in Detroit, where she's currently a junior in high school. She says she's fed up with seeing kids getting kicked out of school for minor infractions.

"My peers are being expelled and suspended without the benefit of the doubt," she explains. "Their voices aren't being heard."

She's making sure hers is, advocating against the state's "zero-tolerance policy," which she says can lead to offenses like dress code violations being punished automatically with suspensions. Back when it was implemented 20 years ago, the policy was meant to cover weapons in school, but it has since been expanded to everything from lateness to swearing—and what's no big deal in one district may be grounds for an automatic suspension in another.

While suspension is technically a lighter punishment than expulsion, it can still have detrimental effects. Twenty-one-year-old Kiyana Slade recalls that the more suspensions she got at her Brooklyn high school, the more she fell behind, to the point where showing up to class meant spending the whole day feeling lost.

"I didn't have a support system there," she says. "I didn't believe in myself. So once things started getting tough in school, I just gave up."

She received discharge papers shortly after her 18th birthday. Unlike dropping out, being discharged is akin to expulsion in that you're expected to continue schooling elsewhere, whether online, at an alternative school, or in some other capacity. Kiyana opted to take classes towards her GED and high school equivalency diploma, studying for more than two years before she finally passed it. She just enrolled in community college for the fall.

Some states, like Texas, have recently taken steps to reduce overly harsh punishments, but in past years it was revealed that some students were being suspended up to 100 days in a single school year.

"That's going to put kids on a particularly poor trajectory," says Deborah Fowler, deputy director of social justice nonprofit Texas Appleseed. While expelled students have to attend alternative education programs, she explains, suspended kids can sit at home all day. "It's really hard to imagine that they would be on track to keep up with their peers."

Across the country, the playing field is also still far from being level, especially in terms of race. According to a recent report, black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times higher than that of white students, and black girls in particular are suspended at higher rates than almost any other demographic.

And, as you might expect, more options are available to students whose parents' incomes allow them to enroll in private school, hire an attorney to fight the decision, pay tutors, or go away to boarding school. While students generally have to disclose their expulsion on college applications, admissions reps say they judge these incidents on a case-by-case basis.

Even for low-income students, expulsion doesn't have to be an education death sentence—though schools certainly have a long way to go when it comes to providing proper support. Back when he was in high school in Queens, Nilesh Vishwasrao remembers specially-designated police officers called SSAs standing outside school everyday, barring him from entering the building when he did something wrong. "The worse it got inside school, the worse it got outside," he says. "It made me feel like a criminal."

Early senior year, he was hauled in to the guidance counselor's office with his father and advised to drop out. Now a 20-year-old college student, he says he looks back and wishes that, "rather than just tell me to give up, they had told me to try harder or given me real alternatives."